Update: Continuous Delivery in Organizations Terrified of Risk slides from Mark’s presentation are available!
When an organization is terrified of taking risks, the change management requirements can make it seem impossible to get the full benefits of Lean and Agile. This talk covers strategies for lowering risk & meeting change management requirements with examples of a project at the US Treasury.
Most software organizations are focused on delivering business value to customers, but no matter how quickly new features are completed, they can’t be used by customers until they are actually deployed into production. Continuous delivery builds a technology and process pipeline to get business value efficiently from story to production with maximum automation, minimal time, and high reliability. By removing the risks and costs associated with manual deployment, organizations are free to deliver small incremental changes to running systems at much higher velocity and much lower risk than traditional approaches.
If you work on important applications in an organization with many change management requirements, it may seem like creating a continuous delivery pipeline is impossible. While it definitely isn’t easy, it is possible—even for government organizations.
In this talk, we are going to look at concrete ways to meet the governance requirements of large risk-averse organizations while decreasing the amount of time it takes to get capabilities and features into production. There is no magic formula, but we will look at examples of how to meet governance requirements with a high deployment velocity. In addition to examining technology that can lower risk and cut cycle time, we will also explore the human aspect of selling a new approach to an organization where the cost of mistakes is high and the reward of Agile deployment may not be fully understood. We will also look at some concrete examples of the return on investment of rapid deployment that can be used to help explain the value to your organization.